Since I had to do manual labor to make some cash come not-quite-nightfall, I wasn't going to be able to hear the final Shofar blast of the atonement season. And I was already eating as my fast had ended fast. So, I figured the holidays, for me, were over and decided to walk toward the Bermondsey Street Fair, first stop of my post-atonement life.

I'd wanted to attend Yizkor, of course, so I could appropriately remember my mother and the other, somewhat more distant relatives I make a point of remembering -- especially if they have no one else to remember them -- but I was far from the synagogues I knew and there was no reason why I couldn't remember my mother in the secular realm (it was the remembering that would matter to her). So, yeah, I was going to Bermondsey.

As a matter of fact, on the way, I made a point of walking past that boarded-up East End synagogue I'd tried to attend on Rosh Hashonah, wanting to take a picture of its deadness on the holiest day of the year.

But, um . . . the door.

It opened.

Just a crack.

And there were people in there.

Praying.

It was a tiny congregation, filled with a single representative, maybe two, of every type of Jew that lived in the area during the East End's goldman age -- a modern Orthodox rabbi of about 60, a stocky, heavy-coated/babushka lady, a younger woman with baby, father and young son, two 20-something Chassids, various sizes and shapes of established men of the community . . .

It could easily have been a bunker in which to ride out the end of an era but it was, instead, the last lighted window in a world gone dark. Shoots of sun coming through the skylight illuminated the continuation of a way of life that once lit so much more. And once inside the light, you did not have to think about the darkness without.

In fact -- glorioski -- I even got called up to the Torah.

A mitzvah! (They didn't have to know about the eating thing.) My Hebrew name was spoken aloud.

In a synagogue in the East End of London, where Jews once reigned (somewhat ) supreme, the name of a Brooklyn boy and his Bronx father -- Chanan Yaakov ben Meyer Simcha -- rang through the East London air like so many Bow Bells.

Afterward, the men, of course, shook my hand.

And when the time came for the memorial service, I offered my mother's name up to to sail similarly through the English air.

But, uh, I didn't know it in Hebrew. So, I had to say it in English.

The rabbi translated it -- probably wrongly as there's a lot of leeway in the English name/Hebrew name translating game. But, you know, I had already said her name aloud in that sanctuary.

Her real name, not some Hebrew equivalent.

So, I folded up my borrowed tallis and continued my inexorable march toward the Bermondsey Street Fair.